The sighting of a large black cat seen prowling a rural property in Goulburn has been the first for some time and I have been wondering why is this so? I believe these cats roam certain ares of the country side Australia wide but since the sightings phenomena of the 90's reports have substantially diminished.

I lived in a rural setting 60 kilometres south of Perth at the base of Darling Ranges during the 1990's and there was a spate of sightings and reports in the vicinity. I personally had an experience one night when coming home around midnight I got out of the car to hear a very loud growling about 100 metres away. On my corner was a blue street light but because of the high humidity from light rain vision was restricted but I could tell the growls were coming from the other side of the road beyond the street light. From the continued growls I could trace just about where it was. Horses in the paddock were frantically galloping from one side to the other snorting as they pulled up. Amazingly a few nights later the same thing happened but this time my next door neighbour came out with a spot light and asked''what the hell was that?''I said I don't know, but the only time I had heard those type of roars was in the big cat enclosures in the zoo. A resident of Jarrahdale a small town up in the hills not far from me reported seeing what he described as a large black bear jumping his fence after it created havoc in his chicken enclosure. Another incident was when a national parks ranger was walking along a track when he had the distinct feeling he was being stalked and when he looked around he saw a large cat slink away into the bush. As I said many sightings in the nineties but virtually none of late.

Sometimes one person thinks they are the only one to have seen something and are too afraid to tell anyone else lest they be ridiculed. But if an extraordinary event is reported as being witnessed by one person, then others who have seen something similar may feel the courage to come forward, and hence we have have a "spate" of sightings.

Alternatively, this phenomenon can have a potential negative effect, whereby one person reports that they think they have seen something extraordinary, and other people start believing that some experiences that they would otherwise consider ordinary are somewhat extraordinary.

Back when I was a teenager, I recall a report from a local newspaper of a large black panther like creature seen crossing the road late at night in central Victoria. After one family had witnessed the creature, a spate of reports came in from others traversing that same stretch of road late at night, who had also witnessed a large, black "catlike" creature in their headlight beams.

Travelling on the schoolbus through that area every morning, I asked one of the local boys who got on at the bustop if he had seen the creature, and if he was worried ... he responded with a contemptous smirk - "bah, everyone knows it's just the 'Johnson's'* dog roaming the paddocks at night - it's a rottweiler with a long tail. But it doesn't attack the sheep so nobody worries about it."